Carney said one of the sources mentioned in the Times article, Bo Olson, left Amazon after attempting to defraud vendors. Olson was quoted in the Times article as saying "nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk."

The Times, Carney said, "never asked us to check or comment on any of the dozen or so negative anecdotes from named sources that form the narrative backbone of the story."

An employee quoted as saying she did a four-day all-nighter said she wasn't forced to do so.

Amazon investigated the article's specific claims and presented The Times with its findings, Carney said, but it didn't make changes.

Carney slammed The Times for not mentioning that Bo Olson, one of the story's named sources, left the company "after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records."

Carney also quoted another former employee named in the article, Dina Vaccari, as saying she was not forced by Amazon to undergo a four-day all-nighter mentioned in the piece. She said: "I was enrolled in the University of Washington's Foster Technology MBA program while I was in charge of building three new Amazon retail categories and going through an emotional breakup when I didn't sleep for those four days. No one ever forced me to do this — I chose it and it sucked at the time but in no way was I asked or forced by management to do this."

Here's a particularly brutal passage:

In any story, there are matters of opinion and there are issues of fact. And context is critical. Journalism 101 instructs that facts should be checked and sources should be vetted. When there are two sides of a story, a reader deserves to know them both. Why did the Times choose not to follow standard practice here? We don't know. But it's worth noting that they've now twice in less than a year been called out by their own public editor for bias and hype in their coverage of Amazon.

Carney said Amazon was responding publicly in this fashion because after investigating the article's claims, it "presented the Times with our findings several weeks ago, hoping they might take action to correct the record."

"They haven't," he added, "which is why we decided to write about it ourselves."

Some Amazon employees had already hit back at the Times report soon after its release. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, had said the report didn't "describe the Amazon I know." An engineering manager, Nick Ciubotariu, wrote an extensive rebuttal calling the article a "hatchet piece."

Carney doesn't make any mention of a Medium post written by Julia Cheiffetz, another former Amazon employee, shortly after The Times published its story. Cheiffetz wrote that after reading The Times' article, she "wept." She had cancer and a baby while working for the company, encountered issues after taking time off, and subsequently resigned. "Please," she wrote to Bezos, "make Amazon a more hospitable place for women and parents. Reevaluate your parental leave policies. You can't claim to be a data-driven company and not release more specific numbers on how many women and people of color apply, get hired and promoted, and stay on as employees. In the absence of meaningful public data — especially retention data — all we have are stories."

"The points in today's posting challenge the credibility of four of the more than two dozen named current or former Amazon employees quoted in the story or cast doubt on their veracity," wrote Baquet. "The information for the most part, though, did not contradict what the former employees said in our story; instead, you mostly asserted that there were no records of what the workers were describing. Of course, plenty of conversations and interactions occur in workplaces that are not documented in personnel files."

Olson described conflict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of bosses, and acknowledged that he didn't last there. He disputes Amazon's account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that.

If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so.

His one quote in the story was consistent with those of other current and former employees. Several other people in other divisions also described people crying publicly in very similar terms.

Regarding Carney's point that Dina Vaccari was not forced by Amazon to undergo a four-day all-nighter mentioned in the original NYT piece, Baquet writes:

The complaint is that when we quoted Vaccari on how hard she was working, staying up for four days straight, we made it sound like "Amazon's culture forced her to do those things." But we did not say that; we emphasized in the story that what was fascinating was that workers often take it upon themselves to work extraordinarily hard.

We also said in the article that Vaccari "and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had internalized Amazon's priorities." We quoted Vaccari on her motivation: "I was so addicted to wanting to be successful there. For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from."

You cited a LinkedIn post that Vaccari recently wrote, but did not quote the whole post. At the end of it, she asks if there is a way to accomplish Amazon's results in a less painful way: "What happens when you give the tin man a heart? I truly believe a culture such as this — a culture that embraces the head and the heart, values data as much as empathy, marrying technology and humanity — is feasible." It's hard to argue that she is refuting our story.

Business Insider has reached out to Times reporters Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld for comment.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.